LOST TO ABUSE
Without more funding, CT’s new domestic violence laws falter
Hearst Connecticut Media newsrooms spent a year investigating intimate partner violence in Connecticut. We found key systems are failing to adequately support the tens of thousands of residents who are victimized each year, and most critically, those who are lost to abuse.
Connecticut has passed a series of strict laws in recent years that have aimed to prevent domestic violence by holding offenders accountable and better supporting victims.
But for all of the changes in wording, there has been virtually no change in several of the key public funding streams meant to directly address the issue. The financial backing has stayed fairly level despite
increasing demand for help that accelerated even more amid the pandemic. That’s led to some victims being turned away for critical services, including shelters. “Is this a priority or not? Because it should be,” said Meghan Scanlon, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which receives government funding and doles it out to its 18 member organizations.
Funding from the government is vital to supporting essential services, including the state’s domestic violence hotline, support groups, counselors, court advocacy and community education.
Funding for providing domestic violence prevention resources and training in the state, which flows through CCADV, has remained relatively flat, with revenue from federal and state grants fluctuating between $11 million to $13 million a year since at least 2015.
The fiscal year of 2020 was an exceptional funding year since CCADV received more federal funding through the Victim of Crime Act to operate the new statewide hotline Safe Connect.
Connecticut ranks in the middle of the pack nationally, 25th among states for spending on domestic violence shelters and programs per capita, at $4.82 per person in the state.
“Connecticut has been a leader in preventing violence and protecting victims, but at the same time the dollars have not kept up,” said state Sen. Mae Flexer, a Democrat from Mansfield who has been involved with crafting domestic violence-related legislation in Connecticut for the past 10 years.
Advocates point out that as funding has remained flat, so too has the number of victims. Nearly 38,000 victims of domestic violence in Connecticut sought help from service providers in 2020, which was hardly changed from the 41,000 victims in 2015. The number of people killed by intimate partner violence has also stayed relatively steady at about 14 per year.
Scanlon and other advocates all cited stagnant funding as a major hurdle to addressing the myriad problems that contribute to, and result from, intimate partner violence.
“The issue of domestic violence is a public health issue, but it’s also much more complicated than people appreciate,” she said.
Scanlon said programs that affect women and girls historically don’t get as much attention or funding. Even though intimate partner violence affects every type of person, it is still seen as one relevant to just women, she said.
“If we had as much attention or investment as other things get, we could be impacting change in a much bigger way than we are,” Scanlon said.
Flexer said the state has made some investment, but not enough to meet the actual need.
“I think we’ve done a good job with the limited resources we have, and I think we haven’t been able to expand that money because there hasn’t been an opportunity to in a lot of state government,” Flexer said. “We have an opportunity right now, so let’s make these investments.”
Gov. Ned Lamont’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
*** In Connecticut, money for domestic violence prevention and support flows to CCADV and its 18 member organizations, which provided services to nearly 38,000 victims in fiscal year 2020 and received more than 32,000 calls to the statewide hotline, Safe Connect.
One of the largest and most immediate needs for people trying to escape violence is having another place to stay. But the need for domestic violence shelters consistently outpaces capacity, and Department of Social Services funding for it has remained mostly flat for the past decade.
One day last year, advocates tracked how many people in Connecticut were turned away from services because the programs lacked resources and funding. They found 35 people were turned away, most of whom were seeking housing, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence 2021 Domestic Violence Counts Report. When advocates did the same exercise one day the year before, nearly 100 people were turned away, the report said.
CCADV member organizations reported a 26 percent increase in the number of adults and children housed in the fiscal year that ended in late June 2020, which included just three months of the coronavirus pandemic.
The pandemic has greatly increased demand for many services.
Bridgeport’s Center for Family Justice witnessed a 25 percent increase in overall demand for services as well as an 18 percent increase in domestic violence cases between 2019 and 2020. Safe Futures in New London served close to 10,000 victims across Southeastern Connecticut in 2020, a 39 percent increase over 2019.
One of the service models considered best practice in the field of domestic violence work is a “family justice center,” which provides services addressing all a victim’s needs in one physical location.
To date, there are two in all of Connecticut — one in Bridgeport and one in New Haven — with plans for a third just getting off the ground in New London.
The family justice center model focuses on wrapping services around the victim under one roof. This includes police, prosecutors, victim advocates and other providers. The model helps remove transportation and child care barriers for victims and simplifies the process.
With wraparound services, a victim who might normally take 10 to a dozen times to leave an abusive situation would take an average of only three to four times, and be safer while doing it, said Katherine Verano, executive director of Safe Futures, a nonprofit that supports victims of domestic violence.
The first such center in Connecticut opened in Bridgeport in 2015 as the Center for Family Justice in what used to be the Center for Women and Families of Eastern Fairfield County.
New Haven’s Hope Family Justice Center was able to open its doors in 2019 following a long road of fundraising and after city government funding originally eyed for the project ultimately fell through.
New London County’s center has been 20 years in the making for Verano, the visionary and leader behind the project. It is challenging to get the funding to build such a center, and they can take many years to get off the ground.
Cities and organizations looking to establish these centers don’t receive any federal funding through the CCADV.
Advocacy groups say if more money were dedicated to preventing domestic violence, it would pay off in the long run. The lifetime economic cost of intimate partner violence is estimated at $3.6 trillion nationally, which includes costs of medical services for injuries, lost productivity from paid work and help provided by the criminal justice system, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nonprofit organizations across the state work daily to try to improve support and services for victims, but often are struggling to get by with the funds they have, saying they have received too little help from the government.
Last year was an unusual bright spot as CCADV saw more federal money come its way for its newest initiative, the Safe Connect hotline. The funding came through the Victims of Crime Act under the U.S. Department of Justice.
But since 2008, which was the last major cost-of-living adjustment that the nonprofits received as determined by the federal government, any marginal increases the organizations have received have been around 1 percent — below the inflation rate — Scanlon said.
“Needless to say, that does not address the increase in needs and complexity of cases,” she said.
Money passed through CCADV is not the only way in which domestic violence services are funded. Programs and staffing that support victims and prosecution are also funded through the Judicial Department and the Department of Social Services.
CCADV’s work also includes providing training about domestic violence to law enforcement, medical personnel, and other professionals who interact with victims, but Verano said the state needs to require the same thorough training across the board to anyone involved with a victim or offender, including prosecutors, judges, police and nurses. The biggest reason that doesn’t happen already? A lack of funding, Verano said.
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More funding is needed not only to support daily, on-theground services, but also to help back critical research around intimate partner violence.
For example, one major area of concern that some advocates say needs both attention and funding is research around the role of strangulation in domestic violence.
It is a factor police look at closely when they try to assess whether abuse victims’ lives are potentially at risk. Data from those screenings show it is a common way abusers harm victims. More than a third of victims screened for risk of homicide reported being strangled or choked by their partner, according to a report by the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
But despite the prevalence of strangulation, not enough people interacting with victims — police included — fully understand its implications or impact, Verano said.
Strangulation can cause traumatic brain injuries and disrupt oxygen to the brain — partially or completely — resulting in symptoms of depression, memory loss, changes in mood or difficulty sleeping, among others, according to the CDC.
Yet, research hasn’t provided a nationwide estimate of the prevalence of brain injuries resulting from intimate partner violence.
The presence of a brain injury may be difficult to identify if the symptoms aren’t severe or if time has passed since the trauma. Nevertheless, a victim’s decision making can be affected and lasting, Verano said.
“I don’t know how many agencies in Connecticut have a clear knowledge of it (strangulation),” Verano said.
Safe Futures was one of 12 agencies — and the only one from Connecticut — recognized in a national report for being proactive in assessments for strangulation and concussions and doing training with medical personnel and law enforcement.
Safe Futures has been training its staff and law enforcement partners on the signs and effects of strangulation for the past six years, but Verano insists it should be done statewide.
Verano said it may be a while before it gains widespread support. The funding isn’t there to implement it, she said.
“Look at how many examples it took for people to understand the impact of concussions,” Verano said, comparing that research to intimate partner strangulation.
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The first Connecticut law aimed at helping people in abusive situations came in 1977. It authorized the court to grant temporary restraining and protective orders to protect a spouse from further abuse and was soon expanded to include other family members.
The incident that truly changed the way domestic violence cases are handled came as a result of the brutal stabbing and near killing of Tracey (Thurman) Motuzick in 1983 and her subsequent lawsuit against the city of Torrington and its police department.
In 1986, the state’s Family Violence Act was enacted. It established mandatory arrests for domestic violence cases in the state and required police training specific to domestic violence and to inform victims of their rights and services. The law also required that domestic violence suspects go before a judge on the next available court date and added another dimension to the court system — the Family Relations Division, which directs offenders into counseling and offers services to victims. The law required the monitoring of protection and restraining orders and created centralized reporting for family violence cases.
More recently, as research and understanding of intimate partner violence has grown, Connecticut has sought numerous legislative solutions with an update or addition to domestic violence laws every year since at least 2014.
Changes to domestic violence laws in recent years have included eliminating mandatory dualarrests for domestic violence offenses, requiring firearms be removed within 24 hours after a restraining order is put in effect, as well as extending the length of civil restraining orders, and adding definitions of strangulation, threatening and stalking to the “domestic violence” statute.
Some law changes throughout the years have included new funding to the judicial branch or social services.
For example, Connecticut earlier this year became the third state in the U.S. to pass a law address
ing coercive control in domestic abuse. The update, often called “Jennifers’ Law,” went into effect Oct. 1 and expanded access to restraining orders — a civil course of action for people seeking relief from harassment, threatening and other types of violence — by updating the statutory definition of domestic violence. The new definition now considers “coercive control” a type of violence that could warrant court ordered protection.
The change is anticipated to result in up to an additional 4,000 restraining orders applications over the next two years. To accommodate the increased load, the state’s Judicial Department received funding to hire up to six additional clerks and family relations counselors for each of the busiest districts at a cost of around $800,000.
The law also established a grant program to provide lowincome survivors with access to legal assistance when making an application for a restraining order in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Stamford and Waterbury where the most domestic violence cases are heard. The program was piloted in Waterbury’s judicial district at a cost of $400,000 and served about 500 people. The Judicial Department was allocated money to continue the program for at least the next two years.
But, Flexer said, those recent funding allocations have not been the norm. Over the years, most additional allocations have been minimal. In other cases, initial investments were never expanded to meet growing needs, and programs never went further than the initial pilot phase, according to Flexer.
For example, Flexer said, an ankle bracelet monitoring program for people subject to protection orders that was piloted in Bridgeport, Danielson and Hartford in 2010 continues to operate in those locations, but has not been expanded to any other cities since.
“I think there’s a lot of things where we (the state) are a national leader and some things where we’re really far behind,” Flexer said.
Still, Flexer applauded advocacy groups for the work they have managed to accomplish on tight budgets.
“CCADV has been creative with doing a whole lot with very little,” Flexer said.
And on the bright side, Flexer said she couldn’t recall any program that has been cut after it was created.
“In a time when we’ve been cutting a whole lot of things, we haven’t cut domestic violence initiatives,” she said.
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Beyond the funding that’s needed directly for domestic violence prevention and victim support, experts and advocates say other major societal problems contribute to domestic violence. But resources and funding to address those underlying issues has also been scarce.
“You can’t treat domestic violence as a vacuum separate from the larger political economy — education, housing, citizenship, job opportunities,” said Hillary Haldane, a professor of anthropology at Quinnipiac University. “We’re not going to solve domestic violence by just looking at domestic violence. By the time you get there, it’s a Band-Aid.”
Haldane said society is not in a prevention stage yet since most solutions to domestic violence are addressing the problem as it comes.
“Our culture produces domestic violence,” she said.
One of the consistent findings of CCADV’s Fatality Review Task Force over the years has been unmet or undiagnosed mental health concerns and substance abuse or addiction in offenders.
Scanlon said she would like the coalition to address more needs of abusers such as mental health, substance abuse and childhood trauma.
Exposure to domestic violence during childhood, whether witnessing it done to a parent or experiencing it, can be devastating throughout a person’s life, according to research. Most children who witness domestic violence may manifest symptoms associated with post traumatic stress disorder. They may also have difficulty learning, may be more aggressive themselves, and have trouble establishing good relationships with peers, according to the The Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center.
“If we received more funding, we could be focusing more on prevention and also our services and meet the kids where they are to at least contribute to breaking the cycle,” Scanlon said.
Unless the state can remove the lingering barriers to victims reaching service and the long term needs of abusers, progress will continue to move slowly, Scanlon said.